Over the past couple of months, I've been getting a number of emails asking me about SkyOS' status. Since I didn't know anything beyond what's on the SkyOS website, and because, well, I have no affiliation with SkyOS, I couldn't really reply to these emails. However, after yet another email sent to me late last week, I decided to simply... Email Robert Szeleney, the man behind the project.

I don't know what his best solution today should be, but I am sure of what he should have done 4-5 years ago.

And that is to let registered users have access to most if not all of the code. The license could have required that any changes they made had to stay inside the project, and thus he would roll in the code from those other users when it was up to his standards.

As it is he has been doing *ALL* the key work for years, when there has always been some free labour to handle many of the needed code cases.

Most FOSS has 50%+ of the work done by just a few key coders, but the rest is done by the mass of users out there. He just had to control what of those extras get rolled into the official OS.

This does not mean he had to give up control of the OS, just that he could have farmed out some of the development to those who already were committed to the OS since they paid money just to get into the program. I am sure if he had done so that a lot more drivers and support programs would have been written by now.

I am basing that view on what I am seeing with the development of Haiku. The coding standard already is predefined. The APIs are mostly already defined. The key commit developers spend a lot of time discussing what code will be a part of the official OS. And that is basicly what they spend their time debugging and supporting.

Heck, maybe he should use Haiku's kernel? I think the MIT licence would allow that.

Open sourcing does not necessarily imply loss of control on the direction of the project. After-all, aren't there many contributors to the Linux kernel yet requiring blessing by Linus himself before being incorporated into the main source tree? On the other hand, the various Linux distributions (from a common kernel) are focused on a few aspects which tie together the main contributors to a given distribution? Mint and MythTV are examples which comes to mind for multimedia delivery.

Maybe there could be some synergies with the Haiku project - after-all, isn't the SkyOS File System a derivative of the BeOS File System?

This may come 5 years later than it should have. Nevertheless, still better late than never or before complete bit erasure.